Hush's Last Stand
by Comp Ninja
Summary: Thomas Elliot, a childhood friend of Bruce Wayne, has returned. Once again marshalling his enemies against him, he will go to any extreme to destroy everything and everyone the Dark Knight holds dear. Will Batman survive? Only one way to find out.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Death By Comedy

"Darling, I believe we've had a miscommunication." The Joker waltzed around a tied-up Lucius Fox. "You see, I don't have an appointment. I don't want an appointment. I don't need an appointment. In fact, you should be honored to have a piece of my time. Are you honored?" He tried not to let it show, but Lucius felt like passing out. The Joker killed people for a lark. He might lose his train of thought and attempt a banjo solo on his small intestines.

Formerly a hitman working under the alias of Jack Napier, murder came very naturally to him. If Batman had stopped him from falling into that vat of chemical waste, he would have probably continued killing, just not on such a grand scale. Rumor had it he had once gassed an entire kindergarten class as a birthday present to himself.

"You won't believe who I ran into yesterday. An old friend by the name of Thomas Elliot, a real class act, that one. He told me to ask you for a big secret about the Batman. Naturally, it piqued my interest. So tell me what I want to hear before I yank out your tongue." Sweat creased along his forehead. He had no clue what this maniac wanted and he desperately needed to. "Oh, really. How wonderful. It seems I'll get to kill you. Bye, bye, gramps." He scooted his chair next to the broken window. "Mind the step."

Faced with certain death, Lucius blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "Bruce Wayne." He paused a moment. "Bruce Wayne knows Batman." He rattled off this nonsense between gasping breaths. Trying to keep his poker face as the Joker wheeled him away from the edge and towards the door. For the first instance all night, he saw the faces of the security guards, their dead faces twisted into eternal grins.

"Shucks and I guess I don't get to kill you after all. No hard feelings, I hope." The Joker winded a toy box and walked out of the room. "Enjoy your gift. You might find it a real blast. Hah, hah, hah, hah!" The childhood nursery rhyme of "Pop Goes The Weasel" took on an ominous tone. Bracing himself for the worse, Lucius looked away. When nothing happened, he looked back to see a mere jack-in-the-box bobbing its head around. Lucius sighed in relief the moment before flames engulfed the room. 


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Unexpected

Alfred Pennyworth had seen Master Tim off to bed hours ago when the knock came at the door. Few unexpected visitors of Wayne Manor ever found Bruce Wayne at home. Alfred could only hope no one had ever noticed that. A second knock came as Alfred rushed to greet their guests. Though a genteel sort by nature, Alfred gave more than passing thought to reaching for the Winchester.

The last time an unexpected visitor came this late to the manor, it had nearly cost Master Bruce his life. His instinct of self-defense overwhelmed his deeply ingrained need for civility. Alfred Pennyworth would not let some bloody psycho give him another concussion. Too many of those raised questions as well as medical bills.

One step from the door, a hissing noise entered Alfred's ears. If he had recognized it as a rather powerful acid eating through the doorknob, he'd have probably fired the shotgun already. The door busted open under the forward thrust of a front kick. The Winchester, once wrapped a vise-like grip, scrambled across the floor. There in the threshold stood one of Batman's worst enemies, the Joker.

"Honey, I'm home." A second after his grandiose entrance, the Joker saw the Winchester. "Come now, Jeeves, we'll have no need for violence." He placed the shotgun into his purple coat. "Not yet anyways." At this most inopportune moment, Master Tim came downstairs for a glass of water. "Lookey what we have here." The sight of the Joker shook the sleep out of Master Tim. "Two hostages for the price of one."

Alfred feared the worst. The Joker, a madman whom modern psychology had failed to classify, possessed a brilliant and terrible mind. If he had in his insanity deduced Batman's secret identity, everything Master Bruce had worked for these past ten years might come screeching to a halt.

The Joker took a long look at Master Tim like he recognized him from somewhere. "Cute kid, Britman. I knew one about his age once. I beat him to death with a crowbar. I guess you could say he couldn't quite prove his mettle. Hah, hah, hah, hah!" The Joker paced about the house, perilously close to a few hidden entrances to the Batcave.

Whenever the Joker looked away, Tim asked silently for permission to take him down. Alfred answered the same way each time. Wait. The Joker had given no indication that he knew Bruce Wayne's secret. A butler brandishing a shotgun at an unwelcome late-night visitor made sense. A little boy in pajamas attacking a full-grown man with an acrobatic martial art might raise suspicions.

The Joker walked into Bruce's private study and eyeballed a portrait of Thomas and Martha Wayne. "What a bunch of stiffs." An expression of sudden inspiration came over his chalk-white face. He snapped his fingers. "I know what it needs." He climbed onto the mantle over the fireplace.

He produced a spray can and proceeded to vandalize the painting. Forgetting his place, Alfred tried to stop him. The Joker drew a revolver at his head without looking away from his work. He had written THE JOKER WAS HERE in red letters. "Ah, much better."

Kicking off his shoes, the Joker sat down in Bruce Wayne's favorite chair. "Now, as they say, to business." He placed a cuckoo clock on the wall behind him. "I have enough C-4 wired to this cuckoo clock to turn Wayne Manor into Wayne Crater." He smiled quite content with his own wit.

"You have until midnight. If Bruce Wayne doesn't show . . . well, I'd rather not give away the punchline." Alfred pressed the silent alarms on his cufflinks. Alfred did not bother with calling the police. Only one man could stop the Joker. Hopefully, he had not gotten himself killed yet. 


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Break Him

If Andrea Beaumont had accepted his proposal ten years ago, Bruce Wayne would have married and had three children by now. Batman, even after a decade of training and preparation, would never have existed. His descent into darkness would have ended right then and there.

Such thoughts greeted him whenever he fought the Scarecrow. For Bruce Wayne had only one great fear. In his darkest moments, Bruce Wayne feared that in his war against human monsters, he had turned into the ultimate Nietzsche nightmare, a psychopath no better than the ones he hunted.

After a heist at Axis Chemicals, the birthplace of the Joker, the Scarecrow had vanished into the labyrinth sewer systems beneath Gotham. A dark netherworld thriving on the filth and refuse of the city above, the sewers provided a convenient place for criminals to hide.

The night his parents died, the pearls of his mother's necklace had fallen into an adjacent storm drain. To this day, Bruce Wayne pondered what matter of creature inherited the fruits of that bloody night. Such questions, though innocent at first, could envelop the entirety of his mind if left unchecked.

Tomorrow marked the twentieth anniversary. A nameless thug had gunned down Thomas and Martha Wayne at precisely 10:47 PM, June 26, 1987, but left a ten-year-old boy to live with the horror of having witnessed his parents' murders. Sometimes, Bruce did not know what he hated more. The fact that he killed his parents or that he had not enough decency to kill him as well.

Bruce Wayne stared down the barrel of that gun, wanting only death to free him from the sight of his parents' corpses forming blood puddles on the cement sidewalk. Something, whether his conscience or fear of capture, stopped him. As he turned and ran away, Bruce realized that he would have to live with what happened to him.

Though an innocent victim to the unyielding reality of evil, Bruce Wayne refused to spend his life suffering in quiet despair. He vowed that night to rid the world of the evil that had claimed his parents' lives. What happened to him would never happen to anyone else. Never again.

Like a Knight of the Round Table sent to recover the Holy Grail, his crusade took him to the ends of the earth. He trained in whatever field of study that would aid his singular goal. Criminology. Combat. Manhunting. Acting. Whatever trick, technique or tactic that would make him equal to the task.

Bruce Wayne wanted to learn so much so quickly he had accepted help from those he certainly shouldn't have. The League of Shadows had nearly succeeded in destroying the city he sought to save. Evil could not overcome evil. Any methods that ended in death only contributed to the same evil he sought to vanquish from this world.

His decision not to kill had one unintended consequence. It meant that he engaged most of his time fighting the same enemies in the same battles ad nauseam. He had returned the Scarecrow to Arkham more times than he cared to remember. Bruce could only hope that his anonymous donation would help beef up security. He grew weary of seeing the same faces night after night.

The resolution of his night-vision lenses bathed the near lightless void of the sewers with a sickly green glow. A hardwood plank smashed into the side of Batman's head. The cowl protected him from serious injury, but the blow had damaged his night-vision. As he fell to the ground, reeling from the attack, he felt a noose slip around his neck and hoist him off the ground.

"All creatures know fear, Mr. Wayne. And we fear most what we cannot see." Batman's pulse quickened. The Scarecrow had called him by his real name. He tried to stay calm. For all he knew, the Scarecrow had doused him with fear toxin already. Perhaps he simply hallucinated that Dr. Jonathan Crane knew his secret identity. It would certainly rank high among his fears.

Batman grabbed the rope around his neck. "I home-brewed my own recipe of Venom. Try to guess the secret ingredient." The Scarecrow tried to remove his utility belt, only to catch a foot in his face. "Ah! I'll break you, Bruce Wayne, just as I broke Bane and just as he broke you." Batman had the awful suspicion that no fear toxin had interfered with his brain chemistry.

A roar echoed from behind him. A grotesque noise, it echoed with thronging of pain, anger and fear. Hardly an animal on Earth could make that sound. It meant only one thing. The Scarecrow had succeeded in breaking Bane and now used him as a mindless slave to his own fears.

"Break him, boy!" In the darkness, a giant mass raced up to greet Batman as he hung from his neck. Grabbing hold of a Batarang, he sliced the rope and timed his landing onto Bane's back. Batman had learned how to fight in total darkness, a skill his night-vision lenses had all but usurped. Fortunately, he still remembered how.

The meaty and agile fists of Bane collided with the walls around him. At this moment, Batman realized the truth. Bane could not see either. The Scarecrow relied on Bane's strength to defeat Batman. But the dark wasted Bane's most valuable asset, his agility.

A lot of Batman's opponents, such as the Killer Croc and Solomon Grundy, possessed great, even superhuman, strength. Only Bane possessed both the agility and the intellect to properly use it. The Scarecrow had destroyed this latter asset through the process of brainwashing. Nothing but a blind broken shell remained of the enemy who had once defeated him and took control of Gotham.

His arms momentarily stuck in the walls, Batman drove a Batarang through both of them. Hitting the wrist controls to his feeding tubes, the overflow of Venom directly into Bane's brain crippled his enormous bulk. As he neared a fatal overdose, Batman yanked out the feeding tubes. Bane used his last bit of strength to grab him off his back and throw him down into the murky sewage.

Lighting the tunnel of the sewer, Batman realized that the Scarecrow had slipped away, abandoning his fallen pawn to the whims of his enemy. Batman propped Bane up against the wall. He had not stopped a fatal overdose just to let him drown in sewer water. Bane would survive to get the help he needed to recover from this ordeal.

Then, the Batman looked into his communicator and realized that Alfred had tripped the silent alarms. Alfred had them built into his cufflinks after Bane had broken into the Wayne Manor. He would use it to warn Bruce if such an attack ever happened again. Now he had a terrible choice to make. Either he left Bane in the sewer to die or took him to a hospital. Times like these shed some light onto why Harvey Dent used to rely on a coin toss to make his decisions for him. 


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Dark Hours

Twenty years ago, the top brass of Chicago had banished James Gordon into exile. Contrary to popular belief, Gotham did not own a monopoly on corruption. When he tried to air the dirty laundry of Chicago's finest, the Powers That Be transferred him to Gotham, a city so corrupt it made Chicago look like Mayberry.

Such thoughts welcomed James Gordon home to his apartment during the dark hours between sunset and daybreak. The oppressive isolation of the place reminded him constantly of how he ended up here. He remembered his first case here, a report of a disturbance on Park Row. He caught a man breaking into a jewelry store. Though hardly a prize fighter, the man got the drop on Jim, stole his gun and got away.

In any other department, losing a sidearm would have ended his career. In Gotham though, police got away with far worse. Later that night, a man fitting Jim's description gunned down Thomas and Martha Wayne with two bullets from his gun. The report said that a ten-year-old Bruce Wayne had witnessed the whole thing.

If he had done his job properly, Bruce would never have had to watch helplessly as he lost his parents to a stone-cold street predator. He never found the man or his old gun. For ten years afterwards, he accepted the corruption of Gotham as an immutable law of nature, no different from gravity.

Then he came like a thief in the night. He gave this city something it had not felt in decades: hope. Driven by his own guilt, he conceded that the Batman, though a vigilante in every sense of the word, got results. Before long, the crooked cops and dirty badges thought twice about doing business with the enemies of the Batman.

Since the day that two-bit hood had gotten the drop on him, he refined his senses to discern even the slightest whiff of trouble. So, even with the need for sleep bearing down on his overworked mind and body, he detected someone else in the apartment. Seeing a shadowy figure next to his bed, he reached for his gun.

"Put your hands up or I'll shoot." The figure rocked about, enjoying a silent laugh. "Last warning." The silent laughter continued. Jim had no choice. Three bullets left his gun flying hundreds of feet per second. A cop could go his whole career without firing his gun. In Gotham, a cop might make it to the end of the month. Even with Batman around, most criminals just didn't care whether they lived or died.

The figure shook three times in concert with the gunshots. Jim could hear the bullets passing through the plaster behind him. That kind of penetration should have killed him. It hardly fazed him. The figure walked into the light, revealing a familiar face, his own. "What the devil!"

The James Gordon doppelganger had no gunshot wounds, just holes filled in with mud. It meant only thing. Matt Hagen AKA Clayface, film actor turned abomination upon the Lord, had business with him. "I'll make this short," he began, mimicking James' gruff Chicago accent. "Your daughter has undergone surgery for her spinal cord injury, correct?"

James felt like shooting him again, if only to shut his face. "How would know that?" Due to fears that the Joker might attack his daughter again, he went to extremes to keep anything related to her injury quiet. The Joker, though a versatile killer with a flair for the dramatic, had, at his core, the heart of a bully. Once he found a victim, he rode them until they died.

"A friend of mine performed the procedure. He also implanted a miniature explosive in her spine." Jim wanted to throw up. Sick joke or not, it made him sick to even think about it. "A man will call you identifying himself as Hush. You will follow his instructions. Failure to do so will result in detonation. Attempts to tell anyone about this will result in detonation. Think about it."

As Matt turned to clay, Jim knew the answer with only a second's deliberation. His integrity, though the backbone of his existence, served a higher purpose, making the world a better place for the ones he loved. He could not let his daughter die for his stubborn refusal to play their game. Clayface and his friend Hush had chosen their puppet. Jim would dance for them if it meant keeping his daughter alive. 


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Punchline

Batman considered alternatives to a frontal assault. That required intelligence on the situation. Fine-tuning the audio processors in his cowl, Batman could now hear the voice that still haunted his nightmares. "Well, five minutes to midnight and the boy billionaire hasn't shown. Enjoy your front row seats. Hah, hah, hah, hah!"

Batman needed to act fast. He had wasted enough time getting Bane to the hospital. Just as he suspected, the homebrewed Venom could have killed him. A minute late, the doctors said, they couldn't have done anything. Now, he needed to pick up the slack and stop the Joker from killing everyone he cared about.

Proceeding silently through the remnants of the front door, he saw Alfred and Tim tied up to their chairs at the dining table. The Joker, though highly unpredictable, had some semblance of a modus operandi. Whenever he bothered to tie up his hostages, it meant the use of high explosives.

The Joker placed a pistol against the back of his head. "You can't stop me, Batman. At midnight, this place goes sky high." Before he could laugh, the Joker went crashing onto his neck from a shoulder throw. The Joker prepared to fight him, making mock karate noises as he aimed a front kick at Batman's crotch. Batman kicked his back leg out from under him.

While possessing little formal training, the Joker could hold his own in hand-to-hand combat. For one, he fought dirty. Kneecapping, groin kicks, head-butts, biting, clawing, he tried them all. While Batman left a trail of broken bones, the Joker left a trail of corpses. While Batman fought to restore order, the Joker fought to unravel it.

Batman had dealt with animals that fought with more honor and humanity than the Joker. Worse yet, the Joker's madness gave him bouts of insight that allowed him to hit openings in his otherwise solid defense. But dirty tricks and a few moments of clarity could not compete with two decades of practice.

Then a terrible noise echoed through the halls of Wayne Manor. A cuckoo clock striking midnight in step with a deadly explosive. Then the unusual happened. Nothing. "April Fools', Batboob." A fitting thing for the Joker to say in late June. "You really think I would plant a bomb with even the off chance of killing me." He squirted him with acid from his lapel. "The world's greatest detective should have known better."

Distracted by acid eating through the Bat Symbol, Batman lost control of the situation. The Joker buried a right hook into his exposed jaw. Batman flung his bola at him. The Joker jumped over it as he ran through the hole where the front door once stood. "He who fights and runs away lives to kill another day. Hah, hah, hah, hah!"

Exhausted from the fight, Batman took off his mask and let Bruce Wayne take over. In the private study, Bruce looked up to see the memory of his parents defaced as part of a sick joke. Too long, Batman had erected a wall in his mind to keep out the Joker. Rare moments like these brought into stark focus the nature of his adversary, an unrepentant sociopath with little regard for anyone's life but his own.

The phone rang. The coroner's office wanted him to come down to the morgue to identify a body. The Joker had attacked Wayne Tower during Batman's nightly patrol. He killed six security guards and one office worker. The explosion left the seventh victim too badly burnt for a positive identification. 


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Devil's Luck

Joseph Chilton didn't consider himself an evil man. Like any good man, he hated this God-forsaken city. He promised himself a hundred times a day he would leave Gotham and never come back. And a hundred times a day, he betrayed that promise. This city had a way of sucking a person in and never letting go.

No, Joe Chill, as his cronies called him, considered himself a survivor. Survivors didn't trifle over the details of their survival. So he robbed from the rich and gave to himself. So a couple people died because they didn't fork over their valuables fast enough. When a guy had no prospects, he did the best with what he had, nothing.

Joe's own mother, God rest her soul, said he had the Devil's Luck. He walked in and out of situations that should have killed a two-bit crook like him. Take for instance, the crime that gave Crime Alley its name. He rarely carried a gun and preferred raw muscle while mugging. Only by good fortune did he escape that cop and take his gun. Only by good fortune did the gun go off when it did. Thomas Wayne would have cracked his ribs for touching his wife.

The Devil's Luck had its drawbacks. Bad things happened to him all the time. He didn't mean to kill Thomas, but when the lady started screaming, he decided to do her too. He immediately regretted it. When the kid looked up at him with those dead eyes, he felt the temptation to finish him off too. But Joe Chill at his lowest could not kill a kid. It didn't matter if it meant the risk of getting caught. Joe Chill drew the line at killing children.

Carmine Falcone had declared the Wayne family off-limits for reasons no one really understood. He vowed to destroy the mugger who killed them. The mob never found him. The police never found him. Bruce Wayne, though one of the most powerful men in Gotham, never found Joe Chill. Even You-Know-Who never found him. For years, Joe Chill had simply vanished off the radar.

Now, he had an operation, a gang of loyal thugs. His favorite lieutenant messed it all up. He shot a pregnant woman. He rolled on Joe Chill to escape a double life sentence. While Joe had not killed any innocents since that night twenty years ago, he had wasted his share of rivals in his crawl to the top. It lacked the quality of true justice. He had killed two law-abiding citizens and he might end up in jail for the human cockroaches he stepped on.

It looked like Joe Chill's luck, whether diabolic or not, had run out. Then, an unknown benefactor paid for his representation on the condition that he pleaded insanity. He did. Somehow, the lawyer the mystery man hired made it stick. Instead of life behind bars, the judge remanded him to Arkham Asylum.

Joe Chill felt sick. Stonegate he could have done standing on his head. He wondered though how he would fair in a de facto prison for freaks. Heck, Harleen Quinzel just worked there and look what happened to her. The big names resided in Arkham. The Joker, Poison Ivy, the Mad Hatter, Mr. Freeze, Scarecrow and even the infamous Victor Zsasz, a prolific serial killer second only to the Joker.

As he settled into his cell, he drew a sigh of relief. The Joker, as anyone could guess, had escaped. So had Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze and some loser named Garfield Lynns. It meant that someone knew a way in and out of Arkham. He wanted in but no one would talk. Or rather, most of them couldn't. Even the most hardened crook had that familiar glimmer of sanity. He missed that here in Arkham. Unlike him, very few faked insanity in here.

Weeks passed. Joe Chill spent his nights dreaming of prisons populated by sane criminals. On the night of June 26, a knock came at the door. He had a visitor. Joe Chill's heart, pardon the pun, froze over. He didn't have family. He didn't have friends, at least, not ones who would visit him this late at night. He caught sight of the clock. 10:47 PM. A strange sort of feeling, like someone had stepped on his grave, came over him.

Into his cell marched a terrible sight. Into his cell marched Bruce Wayne with resolution in his eyes and a shotgun in his arms. "You killed my parents, Joseph Chilton. Prepare to die." The blood of Joseph Chilton canvassed the walls of his holding cell. His vision blurred and his limbs grew numb. Before losing all consciousness, he felt Bruce Wayne's shotgun shoved down his throat. 


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Too Many Funerals

Gotham had too many funerals. Simple supply and demand made them expensive. The Fox family insisted on a closed casket. Bruce Wayne attended incognito. The weeping masses brought him back to his first funeral. He didn't cry then. Leslie Thompkins told him he could if he felt like it. He hadn't felt like it. He hadn't felt like anything.

He loved his parents with all his heart and someone ripped that all away. He never shed a tear. He let himself drift away into the gray comforts of catatonia. Only the combined efforts of Leslie Thompkins and Alfred Pennyworth rescued Bruce from his own heartbreak. To this day, partial catatonia hampered his ability to express sadness.

Everything had gone wrong. Someone had framed him for the murder of Joe Chill, the man he had spent over half his life looking for. Police found a shotgun belonging to Alfred Pennyworth at the scene of the crime. Bruce Wayne knew that he had made a mistake when he chose not to report the stolen Greener. He just had no idea how severe the consequences could get. The cops had more than the murder weapon. They had a video feed placing Bruce Wayne in Joe Chill's holding cell at the time of the murder.

Dick Grayson made the ultimate sacrifice. Disguised as Bruce Wayne right down to the fingerprint gloves and leg extensions, Nightwing let the police bring him in. He had summoned Dick in the belief that the Wayne Manor would have to weather another attack. He had no idea that the police would come looking for Bruce Wayne.

Alfred made sure to protect Tim from Child Protective Services and their army of lawyers. Child Protective Services had a long-standing grudge with the Wayne Estate ever since Alfred and Leslie's legal acrobatics allowed them to raise Bruce as their own. What they did bordered on the illegal. God only knew why they let him adopt not one but three children.

In addition to his regular work as a butler, Alfred served as a one-man disinformation service. When the police threatened Wayne Manor with a search warrant, he saw to dismantling every entrance to the Batcave. The cops would need seismic radar to detect its presence now. Thankfully, Batman had liberated the Batmobile before Alfred saw to this task.

While not as big a gearhead as he led the public to believe, anyone with an understanding of physics could appreciate the Batmobile. It all the advantages of a tank and a race car one could fit into a single vehicle. It cost a lot of money to build even for Bruce Wayne. Fitted with state-of-the-art ballistics protection, even the President of the United States didn't ride around this safe. Only now that circumstances forced him to live out of the Batmobile did he truly appreciate this modern miracle of automotive technology.

Batman would have had the perfect alibi. With Bruce Wayne in custody, he could have operated at all hours of the day with impunity. Still, Dick's loyalty surprised him. After all the disagreements and the fights, Dick hadn't hesitated to take the fall for him. The police wanted him to take a polygraph test, but what would he say when they asked for his name. He needed to stall for time until Batman could prove his theory.

The video feed had caught someone who looked like Bruce Wayne in the act of killing Joe Chill. The Bruce Wayne doppelganger had the shotgun the Joker had stolen from the manor. And Scarecrow's feeble efforts with Bane lacked the follow-through of a genuine attempt on his life. The last time his enemies moved like pawns on a chess board, the trail led to Thomas Elliot, childhood friend and closeted sociopath, last seen in the Gotham River.

Hush, as his co-conspirators called him, did something that unnerved Bruce Wayne. Not only did he know his secret identity, not only did he know how to manipulate psychos to do his bidding, he knew how to stay out of the picture until the moment he had Batman and Bruce Wayne exactly where he wanted them.

Worse yet, Harvey Dent had gone missing. Before his transformation into Two-Face, he had served as District Attorney of Gotham. After his corrective surgery, the staff of Arkham Asylum deemed him rehabilitated. Mayor Hamilton Hill pulled a few strings to get his old job back as a show of good faith. His involvement in Hush's initial downfall and his own fractured psyche made him a vulnerable target to this growing conspiracy.

Victor Fries, a cryogenics expert, had turned cold-blooded criminal for one reason and one reason only. Hush needed only play the Nora card to manipulate Mr. Freeze into kidnapping Bruce Wayne from police custody. It served to further aggravate public opinion against Bruce Wayne. Wayne Enterprises took the worst dip in stock value since the Great Depression. Several cops present lost fingers and toes to frostbite. Detective Crispin Allen lost an entire arm when he tried to stop Mr. Freeze by firing a shot through his containment suit.

Firefly had set fire to several buildings on Crime Alley to distract Batman. Like an amateur, he took the bait. Hush knew how to push Bruce's buttons. Loosing an arsonist on such a familiar and painful location guaranteed his immediate arrival. It also fitted a bizarre thematic harmony. Hush had used fire to distract Batman from ice.

Bruce Wayne would never forget that fateful press conference held afterwards. Commissioner Gordon condemned Bruce Wayne's apparent collusion with Mr. Freeze. "From this moment on, the Gotham City Police Department has declared war on Batman. We want to send a message. We will not tolerate vigilante justice in our city. Period. If he can hear me, I hope he will surrender now. We have offered a million dollars in cash to anyone who could bring down the Bat." An ironic final note for a man who just spoke out against vigilante justice.

Bruce Wayne took an awful risk coming to the funeral, but he didn't expect to find Thomas Elliot in attendance. The red-haired man in the generic trenchcoat he once called friend smirked. "Wearing your Matches Malone disguise to a funeral." He playfully paced around him. "Have you no respect for the dead?"

Bruce Wayne's eyes narrowed. "What would stop me from taking you out, right here, right now?" Hush had led the Joker to Lucius Fox. He knew it. He could pretty much smell the guilt festering on him like maggots on a corpse. What he would have given to have the permission of his parents to break every bone in his neck.

Thomas Elliot shrugged. "I don't know. The police might want to see that." Hush gestured to the cops. As a close friend of Bruce Wayne, the police anticipated Bruce Wayne making an appearance at the funeral. With Bruce Wayne a fugitive and Dick Grayson a prisoner of Mr. Freeze, he had no choice but to let him go.

At the same time, a legally dead Thomas Elliot couldn't hurt him either. Thomas eyed the impatience in Bruce's eyes. "Nothing in nature happens uselessly, Bruce. You'll get your chance. When you decide to give up your self-righteous mission, I'll introduce you to my wife. You might know her."

The comment about a spouse perplexed Bruce. Thomas Elliot did not seem like the marrying type. Still, some guys had better luck in romance than others. The Joker and Batman had one thing in common, a healthy fear of commitment. The Joker had fired Harley Quinn out of cannon. As for Bruce, he might as well have fired Selina Kyle out of cannon because he would never see her again. Though reports circulated of a female cat burglar in the south of France, he could only hope that Catwoman had not returned to her thieving ways.

Leaving more questions than answers, Thomas Elliot stopped at the graves of Bruce's parents with jealousy in his eyes. In a sick twisted way, Thomas Elliot envied Bruce's tragedy. He would have inherited a fortune if Thomas Wayne had not saved Tommy's mother from that "car accident" that killed his father. Even as Batman, he had met only a few deprived enough to do what he did. Imagine his shock when he realized he made friends with one. 


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Difficulty With Duality

Harvey Dent had one might call a difficulty with duality. No matter how hard he tried to see the gray areas of life, it always separated out into black and white. Mental illness ran in his family. His father had it. His father's father had it. What he turned into seemed more a function of fate than the cruel hand of Sal Maroni.

The two-headed silver coin, an heirloom from before the Dents reached the New World, always seemed magical and mystical to young Harvey. No wonder when he finally broke down, he sought its guidance to protect him from the horrors of his other half, the side he rarely showed even in times of stress.

The shrinks called it dissociative identity disorder. An inadequate personality (their words, not his) produced multiple identities to handle the rigors of life. The dominant half, usually the violent side, controlled the submissive half, which, strangely enough, remained in control the vast majority of the time in most cases.

Having half his face and one of his hands doused in enough acid to eat through cement caused conversion hysteria. It placed the two halves on equal footing. Neither could truly dominate without the aid of an arbiter, in his case, a two-headed silver coin with one of its heads scratched up.

Then along came a spider that promised to fix his face. The doctors believed that he made such progress at Arkham. They believed that this surgery who put this whole dark chapter of his life behind him. That same spider tried to kill Batman but he stopped him. He put two bullets in his shoulders and let him fall into the river.

Even without Two-Face around, Harvey Dent had a puritanical sense of right and wrong, the latter punishable by ignominious death. Such unyielding resolve had cost him half his sanity last time, but he refused to let go. He considered Batman and him kindred souls, men pushed to extremes yet utterly devoted to the cause of justice.

The difference came in lethality. The Batman seemed to believe that if he kept sending them to Arkham and Stonegate, someday they would stop committing crimes. He did the same thing over and over again expecting different results, the definition of insanity. Harvey Dent saw fit to sever the chain by killing the repeat offenders.

Harvey awoke to the smell of camphor salts. There stood a man, a monster really, who assaulted him in front of his wife in his own house one Christmas Eve many winters ago. The Joker had decided a long time ago that if he could not get people to laugh at his jokes, he'd still nonetheless get a reaction out of them.

Harvey Dent had represented a Joker case during his first tenure as District Attorney. Anger. Sadness. Disgust. One grief-stricken mother lashed out at the Joker in court. He made it a point to come after her when he escaped from Arkham. No jury could find the Joker sane enough to take responsibility for his heinous actions.

"Rise and shine, Sleepy Head," the Joker said in that cheerful voice that presaged a ghoulish prank. Harvey Dent immediately looked down at his hands. One of them had regained their purplish-brown scar tissue. It did not require the mirror the Joker had brought him to tell the same had happened to half his face.

"What did you do to me, you maniac?" Harvey fought against the straps around his wrists and knees. "Why did you do this to me?" Harvey could already feel Two-Face rising from the depths. The doctors thought they killed him with psychotherapy. Harvey knew the truth. He only hoped to hold back the floodgates long enough to repent.

"A mutual acquaintance restored your trademark good looks." The Joker had him where he wanted him. So he did what he did best. He gloated. "Now, show us some of that award-winning personality." The Joker drew a sigh. "Let's play a game. Every time you do something sane, I will electrocute you." Harvey knew why he recognized this chair. Legions of inmates at Stonegate had passed through Old Sparky in its heyday. The Joker had either bought it or stole it and adapted this civilized means of execution into an instrument of torture.

"Remember, this all ends when I hear from Two-Face. So what do you say, wanna play?" Harvey's back arched as electricity ricocheted through his body. He didn't know how long he lasted; he started to black out, but knew with deadly certainty that he hadn't lost consciousness. Before he blacked out one last time, he heard the Joker's voice. "It's alive! Now I know what God feels like! Hah, hah, hah, hah!" 


	9. Chapter 9

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Mission

Sprang Mission. A shelter for battered wives. A secret only a handful of men knew, including Batman. Thomas Elliot did not come to the funeral of Lucius Fox simply to anger him, though it did accomplish that. He wanted, however indirectly, to lure him to his base of operations. As a detective, he did not believe in coincidences. Thomas did not use "mission" and "wife" in the same sentence on accident. He wanted him to come here.

Built on a system of underground tunnels unknown to the general public, Sprang Mission resided on the East End, a place of bad memories for Bruce Wayne. Attempted vigilantism in the Red Light District got him shot by a dirty badge, stabbed in the leg by a hooker and nearly crushed in the back seat of a squad car.

Descending onto the roof of the Sprang Mission, he crept through a window into the wedding chapel. His parents had visited this place in their quest to improve Gotham. Between his father's work as a surgeon and his mother's tireless struggle to expose the international child prostitution industry, his parents fought the good fight.

There in the back pew sat a bandaged man in a trenchcoat. Ignoring the horrific smell and the rigor of his limbs, Batman tore the bandages from his face, revealing the burnt visage of the late Lucius Fox. Holding back his urge to scream, Batman found a tape recording in the deceased's vest pocket.

"Excellent work, Bruce. Very few sane people would have come all this way at the direction of a couple stray words. Alas, no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness. So, I'll make it easy for you. Go to the southeast corner. Behind a giant bookcase, you'll find me." The sound of gunfire tore through the doors of the wedding chapel. "By the way, I invited a couple ladies over for a game. Winner gets a million dollars in cash."

Then, the tide came in. Women from every walk of life poured through that door. They hollered the names of their abusive husbands as they charged forward. The Scarecrow must have brainwashed them. Hush could have sent regular criminals against him. He knew the ins and out of psychological warfare. He knew how to mess with him.

When Bruce Wayne first got started, he opted for tights. Alfred threatened to turn in his resignation if he went out on patrol without body armor. No matter how hard he argued about barrier confidence and freedom of movement, he just wouldn't hear it. He made it very clear: Find some body armor or find another butler.

To satisfy his worries, Bruce Wayne donned a modified prison guard vest. It covered his upper body save for his head and arms. The Bat Symbol concealed a trauma plate designed to provide added protection to his vital organs. The cowl had specifications similar to a riot helmet. Throw in the Kevlar around his arms and legs and Alfred calmed down. In the next few minutes, all of that would definitely come in handy.

As he prepared for the fight of his life, he remembered the words of his Krav Maga instructor from his stay in Israel. "Remind three things about fighting multiple opponents. One, to beat them you must believe that you can. Two, you do not have to beat them all. Just establish dominance and the weaker opponents will flee. And three, most important, Bruce, pray. Even with this training, it would take a miracle to survive."

Not a religious man like his own father before him, Bruce still obeyed the words of his instructor. He took one last moment to pray for his safety and the safety of everyone he had endangered in his crusade to rid the world of evil. Many of the fighters canceled out each other's blows. No room for elegance, he hit them fast and hard, paying no attention to the sound of bones cracking.

The vest protected him. One lady sliced her own hand when her knife slid down her palm. A .22, deadly at this range, smashed into the ballistics vest, leaving an ugly bruise, but not a fatal wound. Batman barely felt the Louisville Slugger that collided with his lower back. Neither did he realize until later that someone wore spiked gloves.

Creating an opening, he reached into his utility belt and deployed a flash grenade. Even those trained in one of the many back-alley dojos of Gotham did not know how to fight blind. The frequency and accuracy of his blows increased as he dashed through the doors and made a run for the adjacent building. There in the plaza waited even more women, one of them with an Ingram submachine gun pointed at his head.

Before Batman could reach for a Batarang, a whip shot out from the corner of his eye and disarmed the gunner. He looked over to see Catwoman in all her elegant beauty. She used her whip to create distance between them and their attackers. "I came as soon as I heard the news." Though grateful to see her, he made it clear that she should not have come. "I guess he should not have come either." Out of nowhere came Tim Drake, dressed in his Robin costume, his quarterstaff having already polished off three of them. "Face it, Bruce. You can't get rid of us."

Batman drove the Batmobile by remote into the plaza. The threat of vehicular homicide startled the crowd. In the confusion, all three of them slipped away, no doubt following him to the giant bookcase in the southeast corner of Sprang Mission. When his parents died, their mission to make Gotham a better place lived on in their son. Now, that mission lived on in so many others.

Decades from now, people would not remember Gotham as a place unfit for human life. No, they would remember it as a city brought back from the brink by those who did not know or even care if they would live to see the Gotham they helped to create. In this hope and this hope alone, did Bruce Wayne ever sleep well at night. 


	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Good Soldier

Trapped in an igloo cell, Dick Grayson waited in a subterranean lair not unlike the Batcave. Thomas Elliot has assembled a grand army. Not only did he have an army of brainwashed battered wives, but also he had allied himself to a number of Batman's worst enemies. From what he could see, The Joker, the Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze and Hush inhabited this underground bunker, each desperate for the opportunity to take out Batman.

When Bruce Wayne arrived, he'd have to take them all on. Hopefully, that insufferable loner had not made the mistake of coming alone. Anyone of these guys could finish him off. The Bruce Wayne disguise had worked on pretty much everyone. Scarecrow didn't buy it though. Apparently, he knew the true identity of Batman.

This place must have taken a year to build. It had all the amenities, like a five-star hotel for freaks. It had a refrigerated storage area for Mr. Freeze. It had a chemical laboratory for the Scarecrow's inventions. It had a surgery room for Hush. It also had a jury-rigged electric chair, a must for the freak that enjoyed torturing innocent people. As Robin the Boy Hostage, he had seen the insides of a lot of lairs. This one had its finer points.

Ever since his parents died, he had joined Batman in his war to rid the world of the evil that claimed their parents. Like any war, they had casualties. Barbara Gordon, the only woman he ever truly loved, received a spinal cord injury that robbed her of her ability to walk. Less said about Jason Todd's fate, the better.

As the Oracle, Barbara Gordon provided tech support to the members of the Bat Family. Unfortunately, she left the Clock Tower for a week to recover from routine surgery. It meant that they had to fly a little more blind than usual. It also meant that he could not see her until she returned. She needed her privacy during her "vacations."

Like a good soldier, Nightwing had followed orders and acted bravely. Then, he saw it. The city across the bay, Gotham's ugly stepsister, Bl dhaven. Dick refused to sit by and do nothing. Batman and him had a falling-out over the issue of expansion. He wanted to spend more time solidifying their foothold in Gotham. Dick wanted to reach out Bl dhaven now. The disagreement ended in an ultimatum. Drop it or leave.

Bruce Wayne always operated like that. For the first ten years after the death of his parents, he listened obediently and politely to anyone who would train him. For the next ten years, he expected others to do the same for him. Which just went to show how little he knew about raising children.

Still trapped and going nowhere fast, he remembered the revelation that had occurred at the police stations mere minutes before Mr. Freeze kidnapped him. Commissioner James Gordon shut off the cameras and told everyone to leave him alone with the suspect. Dick Grayson feared the worst. He sincerely thought that the Commissioner might try to rough him off. What happened next changed everything.

"I figured out your secret . . . Dick. A good father should have known where his own daughter goes at night. Listen. You have to get word to Bruce. Hush planted a bomb in Barbara's spine. If I don't go along with this charade, she'll die." The words seemed unreal. How could Bruce Wayne have allowed such a lapse of security?

Hush had outdone himself. He had framed Bruce for murder, blackmailed the Commissioner and turned the Oracle into remote-controlled explosive. Dick needed to escape. The Commissioner knew a way through the back. At just that moment, Mr. Freeze had broken through the front door of the police station.

Dick Grayson must have heard the familiar sound of smoke pellet exploding or the welcome noise of someone's nose breaking because he suddenly knew that Batman had entered the lair. Judging by the commotion, he had backup. In the early days, Batman used to fight these guys altogether. Hopefully, he still knew how. 


	11. Chapter 11

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

No Right Answer

As his unplanned allies came through the front, Batman circled around the back. The time for messy fights would come soon enough. For now, a little strategy would go a long time. In this dark eerily familiar place beneath Sprang Mission, he saw a trio of rooms. One looked like a laboratory, the other a surgery room and the last an execution room. The last grabbed his attention, for in the seat of the electric chair, he saw an eerily familiar face.

Melting the lock with a blowtorch, he rushed to see a delirious Harvey Dent, his face disfigured into its monstrous half-face. Not even acknowledging his entrance, he kept repeating the same phrase over and over again. "Kill me. Kill me. Kill me." A small part of Harvey Dent still remained untainted by Two-Face's dualistic nihilism. A small part of him wanted to die rather than spend one moment reduced to his former condition.

Despite the invincible urban legend persona Bruce Wayne had created for himself, he too blundered into situations which had no right answer. If he killed Harvey Dent, even in the name of mercy, he would have broken the promise he made to his parents. If he allowed Harvey Dent to live, he would condemn his best friend to a fate worst than death. Neither decision in Bruce's mind felt like the right one. Batman placed his hands around Harvey's head, positioned behind him for a clean neck break.

As he prepared to do the unthinkable, the unthinkable walked into the room. "Jeez, Bruce, get on with it already. At this rate, I'll die from old age before Harvey dies from a broken neck." In that single word, his connection with the Joker changed drastically. Even the stoic Batman could not suppress the look of surprise on his face.

"Surprised, Batsy? You should have seen my reaction. I mean, a billionaire and a superhero. How lucky can you get?" The Joker reached into his pockets. "But seriously, I think you've lost your marbles. Here, have some of mine." Unable to remove the straps to the electric chair in time, Batman jumped out of the way as the explosive marbles ripped Harvey Dent apart. The sight of his best friend dead left his heart aching with inconceivable suffering. Imagine how he would have felt if he had actually killed Harvey himself.

"Still don't know how I found you out, huh? C'mon, the world's greatest detective. Please, my brain-dead grandmother wouldn't have figured it out by now." The Joker fired the "BANG!" sign from his spear-gun. "You came to Wayne Manor too quickly. Someone called you. I think the butler did it. Hah, hah, hah, hah!"

He fired again. This time, the trigger released the harpoon. He missed on purpose. His archnemesis deserved a perfect punchline. The Joker needed a little more time to think of a closing act. "Plus, I knew I recognized Timmy from somewhere. You know, Bruce, you really shouldn't keep replacing them because I'll just keep killing them."

That last comment drove him over the edge. Any reminder of what happened to Jason Todd brought out the beast in Batman. Before he knew it, his hands had smashed the spear-gun out from under his grasp and continued a violent campaign against his bodily health.

Batman had neglected his training. He sacrificed a solid defense for a wild offense. It didn't take long for the Joker to have Batman beaten within an inch of his life. The Joker whispered into Bruce's ear. "Hello, Bruce Wayne. I'm the Joker. I'll be your murderer this evening."

The Joker began a narration to an imaginary crowd. "Come, one! Come, all!" He slipped on a joy buzzer. "And witness this shocking conclusion. Watch as the Joker, the Harlequin of Hate, the Ace of Knaves, the Clown Prince of Crime, attempts a feat of homicidal ingenuity ten years in the making. Before your very eyes, he will deliver a continuous stream of electricity into Bruce Wayne, the man who thought himself a bat. I must ask anyone in the audience with weak constitutions to leave the building. This will get ugly. Hah, hah, hah, hah!"

During his incessant rambling, Batman had gotten his second wind. He broke the Joker's left hand at the wrist before tossing the joy buzzer into the all-consuming darkness of the cave. Their fight tampered off on the edge of a cliff facing an immense vertical drop. The Joker reached into his pocket with his good hand and waved the white flag. Regardless of all the shots to the face, the Joker had lost only one tooth.

"You win, Bruceman, I mean, Bat Wayne. Just gimme a chance to stop bleeding." Batman shouldn't have let up. The Joker had pulled this trick on him before. False surrenders gave the Joker his edge. They worked best after particularly brutal thrashings. It fed on his guilt.

To make matters worse, Batman had looked away if only for a moment. Switchblade opened and its blade sliced through the Kevlar padding of his right knee. Reacting on instinct, he slammed the Joker across the face, sending him flying into the gorge giggling like a schoolboy. If anyone else had plummeted into a bottomless pit, he would have assumed that he had accidentally killed him.

The Joker though always had an ace up his sleeve. Even Ra's al Ghul, the immortal leader of the League of the Shadow, didn't defy death as often as the Joker. While the Joker survived by freakish coincidence, Ra's al-Ghul needed to access the Lazarus Pits, the true origin of myths about the Holy Grail and the Fountain of Youth, hidden places that could restore the dead and the dying to perfect health at the risk of permanent brain damage.

As pain stung at Batman, he reached into his utility belt and applied a generous dose of clotting agent onto the wound. He stood up, a feat he barely accomplished. He fought to block out the crippling agony of his injury. A normal man stabbed in a fight had the luxury of getting immediate medical attention. Batman didn't even have the comfort of knowing how or if he would get out of this situation alive.

As he contemplated these deteriorating circumstances, Batman turned around to face a nightmarish sight. The Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze and Hush stood in the threshold. Batman deployed a smoke pellet and vanished from sight. He narrowly avoided a direct hit from each of their trademark weapons. Exhausted and wounded, he could not fight them all at once. He needed to take them out one by one. In short, the Caped Crusader needed a plan. 


	12. Chapter 12

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Boy Wonder

Timothy Drake always knew the truth about the Batman. While the other boys at school feared him and made up stupid ghost stories about him, he knew that the Batman fought on the side of angels. He fought to restore Gotham to its former glory. His mother used to tell him about the Gotham that existed less than two centuries ago, a Gotham devoid of street crime known for its reputation as a decent God-fearing city populated by hard-working men and women.

Only in the latter generations did Gotham turn into a postmodern morality tale. His own father used to work as a low-level enforcer for Carmine Falcone. When his empire collapsed, he went freelance, selling his services to the highest bidder. Men like his father got their thirty pieces of silver for betraying Gotham and all it once stood for.

Tim knew that to avoid his father's fate he would have to find the Batman. Only then could he help treat the plague of corruption and crime. He made a list of all corporate entities that had the means, the motive and the opportunity to fund Batman's crusade. He narrowed it down to Queen Industries and Wayne Enterprises.

Seeing how he could not afford a bus ticket to Star City, he began with Wayne Enterprises. He visited its owner, Bruce Wayne, at his home. He busted him after some clumsy surveillance, but not before he deduced his secret identity. After that, Tim made it clear that he would not leave until he accepted him as his apprentice.

So what did he do? Bruce Wayne adopted him, a decision Tim's biological father met with violent opposition. Still, what could a two-bit criminal do in court against a man with a net worth of 6.8 billion dollars? He told him the risks. In a rare instance of emotional honesty, he even told him what happened to the last Robin.

Jonathan Crane, otherwise known as the Scarecrow, had doused Tim's nervous system with a hallucinogenic drug designed to manifest fears. It made perfect sense that the Scarecrow armed with a hardwood plank turned into the Joker armed with a crowbar. Tim felt the splinters buried in his chin but still saw a crowbar in the Joker's hands.

If he didn't regain his balance, the Scarecrow would beat him to death. Bruce Wayne told him that the hallucinogen's effects disrupted the brain chemistry, but not the psyche. If he could summon the resolve to confront his fears, he could defeat the Scarecrow even in his altered state of consciousness.

The mock Joker smiled. "You know what I did to the last Robin. I beat him to death with a crowbar. I guess you could see he couldn't quite prove his mettle." The laughter echoed in his mind. It took every once of willpower for Tim not to believe what he heard. The Scarecrow's fear toxin had violated his senses. This seemed all too real.

Parrying the crowbar with his quarterstaff, he looked the mock Joker in the eyes. "Forget it. You wouldn't kill me no matter whose faces you steal." In a moment of acrobatic martial art skill, he disarmed the Joker and bashed him over the head with his quarterstaff. Even knocked unconscious, the Scarecrow's illusion did not wear off.

He turned around to face the sight of an ice demon in an astronaut suit. The fear toxin also had the effect of amplifying the presence of already scary places and people. The ice demon extended his hand and released a blast of arctic ice. The toxin had transformed Mr. Freeze, a mere human transformed by a cryogenic accident, into a demon in Tim's mind.

Demon or not, Mr. Freeze had one weakness. Tim delivered a sharp blow to the glass of the containment suit. Causing a breech, Mr. Freeze retreated back to a refrigerated area. Of all the enemies Tim fought; he pitied Mr. Freeze the most. Beneath the cryogenic weapons and the triple human strength, Victor Fries survived in a state of living death only marginally better than the one his wife succumbed to.

"At that's why they call me the Boy Wonder." Pride swelled in his voice as he gazed onto the battlefield. Tim Drake pulled off the impossible. Scared to the point of wanting to vomit, he had neutralized two major villains. Now, he needed to find the Catwoman. Last time he had seen her, she had gotten into serious trouble. 


	13. Chapter 13

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Surprise, Batman

At peak condition with the correct planning, Bruce Wayne could do anything. But with the injuries he sustained on a regular basis and the unpredictable nature of the Gotham underworld, Batman rarely had the benefit of both. Now, he must limp into battle against an enemy that almost killed him once before.

Even as he approached a dangerous showdown, he knew only one reward existed for surviving it. As a reward, he would live to fight another night and another and another and another. Then he would arrive at another showdown. The cycle would never end. Batman had taken out Carmine Falcone and Sal Maroni in his first years. Even with that victory behind him, it never stopped. Men like Rupert Thorne filled the vacuum. The war against crime had no end. But his life did. Someday, he would face death one last time.

Bruce Wayne had a chance at happiness once in a woman named Andrea Beaumont. She too went down the path of the vigilante to avenge the death of loved ones. She had differed from Batman in one way though. As the Batman, Bruce Wayne fought to a fall. Never to the death. As the Phantasm, Andrea Beaumont had slain her enemies, often in cold blood. Only Batman's words kept her from doing the same to the Joker.

As he attempted to walk in stealth, the pain of his punctured knee squeezed a cry from his throat. Hush turned around and fired a couple shots. His aim had decreased since the last time they met. Thomas Elliot had killed Harold Allnut from this range. Perhaps his dive into the Gotham River ruined his hand-eye coordination.

Whatever the reason, Hush had also lost his patience. Half the time, he didn't even bother to aim, letting the law of averages hopefully finish him off. Fighting Hush filled him with the same gut-level nausea fighting Two-Face used to give him. It made fighting him an emotional as well as a physical ordeal.

"Come out. I have a surprise for you." The last time they fought, Hush went to extremes to blight his existence. He even got Clayface to pose as Jason Todd after he vandalized his grave. He loved torturing him because he represented everything he wanted out of life that Thomas Wayne had taken away from him. He suffered long and hard waiting for his mother to die from cancer. He wanted his money. He cared nothing for his parents.

As Batman hid in the shadows from his guns, Hush shouted after him. "What's the matter, Batman? Afraid?" Something about Hush's vocal mannerisms had changed. He did not retain his Aristotle-quoting elocution nor did he refer to him as "Bruce." He spoke more like a run-of-the-mill thug trying to ice the Batman.

Then the turning point occurred. Batman knocked the guns from Hush's hands. From that moment on, he knew who or rather what he really fought against. The movement of his enemy possessed all the grace one might expect from a skilled hand-to-hand combatant, but it had a hollow and empty feel, like a bad reading of lines.

After kicking him in his bad knee, the fighter ran off leaving only one weapon in range. Batman launched the bolo. It wrapped around the legs and send himn crashing to the ground. Limping over to him, his enemy tried to run, hampered by the cables sprung between his legs. He had little hope of escape.

Before this fight got too far, he decided to end this quickly. He got on top of his opponent with a headlock. In one swift movement, he broke the bones in his neck. The adversary scrambled onto his feet as he broke his own neck back into place. "Surprise, Batman."

Hush had made a switch a long time ago, perhaps shortly after he robbed the corpse of Lucius Fox from his grave. Hush had slipped away, leaving his accomplices to set up a grand distraction. In that time, he saw to business elsewhere. Many innocent people might die from this critical oversight. He slammed Matt across the clearing, bits of his clay body mingling with the rock of the cavern walls. "Tell me where Hush went. Now!"

Matthew Hagen chuckled at the notion as his face resumed its melted appearance. "Or you'll what? You can't do anything to me. You can't even kill me." Guys like Matt Hagen reminded Bruce why he needed to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. Matt Hagen had a point. His clay body had virtually no weaknesses except one.

Batman smiled an evil smile as he reached for his utility belt. "If you don't tell where Hush went, I'll bake you." Batman had not sworn on his parents' graves for the last twenty years. But if Hush got away or took anymore innocent lives, his conscience would pay the difference. Clayface screamed as the tip of the blowtorch plunged into his chest. Matt broke down and told him his life story beginning with Hush. 


	14. Chapter 14

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Serious Trouble

Selina Kyle began her life with no morals, ethics, scruples or qualms of any sort. Such things couldn't grow in the barren soils of the East End. She did things she would not have written home to mother about, if she had one. She grew up among the Lost Children, the infamous orphan colony of Gotham. 60 Minutes did a story on it once.

People from her world vanished all the time. No one really cared as long as the politicians spun stories about the steady recovery of Gotham and "their long-term plans to address enduring social issues." Little did the good folks of Gotham remember that politicians often lied but a bullet always told the truth.

Bruce Wayne watched his parents murdered right in front of him. Cloaked in shadows still resided a ten-year-old afraid of a world filled with so much evil. Yet in the core of his being, he rebelled against the laws of nature, spilled his own blood night after night in a quest to overturn evil's dominion in at least one city, if not the world.

While Batman always thought of himself as a vigilante, Selina Kyle would have to disagree. She had known vigilantes. They all had one thing in common. They cared only for themselves deep down. A vigilante would have quit a long time ago. No, Batman fought not for personal vengeance as he would have himself believe.

He fought out of love. He loved deeper than any man Selina Kyle had known. He loved his parents that deeply and out of love ultimately refused to let what they stood for vanish from this earth. He loved Jason Todd like a son right up to the moment he died in his arms. The heartache he felt came from a heart bigger than most.

Selina Kyle wondered if she even had a heart. Years on the streets had turned her body and her mind into powerful weapons. Both operated best when well-protected. If she had a heart, she knew very well how to protect it. She protected her heart by hiding it from everyone even herself.

"Selina Kyle," a digitally-altered voice spoke to her from a rising fog. "Your angel of death has come." From the mist emerged the Phantasm, a figure of great horror in Bruce's life. He had loved her once and she betrayed him by breaking his most sacred rule. For Andrea Beaumont had killed in the name of vengeance.

Unraveling her whip, she dodged as the scythe mounted to her right hand came down on her. A cut ran down her back as the scythe bit into her. She snapped her whip at the ghostly figure of the Phantasm. Her whip phased through the hologram until a hand grabbed her whip. The Phantasm yanked her in, ready for a beheading blow.

At the last minute, Tim Drake deflected the blow. The latest adopted son born from his unspoken desire for a family, Time Drake had the brains and the brawns the other two Robins frankly lacked. An acrobatic martial artist on his way to usurping Batman's title as the world's greatest detective, Tim Drake showed promise.

Selina Kyle, on the other hand, had no desire for a family, unspoken or otherwise. Families always left, one way or another, leaving a child unwanted and alone. Bruce certainly felt that way, a deep-seated hatred at his parents for dying and leaving him stripped of his innocence. While not a shrink, Selina knew what lurked in the hearts of men.

Using Tim to draw the Phantasm's attention, she vaulted through the air with a front flip and landed behind her. Removing her mask, Selina placed her whip against her throat and began to squeeze. "Why did you do it? Why did you betray Bruce?" Only her choking replied. "Answer me!"

She loved Bruce Wayne, not as a bored billionaire playboy, but as a shining example of true triumph over adversity. Tragedy had not turned him into a monster or a criminal. Tragedy had turned him into a hero in the truest sense of the word. Selina realized something awful. Andrea Beaumont had stopped breathing. 


	15. Chapter 15

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Final Showdown

Batman had felt it coming for a long time. He knew someday his war against evil would bring him to a final showdown. Batman had only barely resuscitated Andrea Beaumont in time after Selina Kyle accidentally strangled her. The panic in her eyes reminded Bruce why he shied away from lethal force.

Keep everyone alive. From heroin addicts to clown-themed sociopaths, Bruce clung to this basic idea. As long as he did that, he could navigate the Gotham underworld with peace of mind. All the Batarangs in the world would not help him if he depleted his most valuable resource: his sanity.

Batman freed Dick Grayson. The others took Tim Drake back to Wayne Manor. Alfred would have to administer the antidote to the Scarecrow's fear toxin. Prolonged exposure at higher doses could literally kill a person from fright. Bruce's heart could not take losing another Robin.

Matthew Hagen, Clayface, had sung like a bird. Hush had gone to the Gotham City Police Department armed with cop killers. One of his worst enemies had one of few types of ammunition that could tear through his armor. This conflict would bring him to the end of the road.

He could feel it.

Sailing onto the front step of the station, he looked at the roof. Someone had destroyed the Bat-Signal. That and the million-dollar-cash bounty on his head kept him away from the police station. Whatever Hush had done inside there, he didn't want anyone calling for help. Kicking down the door, he found a horrifying sight. Thomas Elliot had gone on a shooting spree, killing some and wounding many.

Batman could only hope for the best and expect the worst. He walked into the office of Commissioner James Gordon, a man forced into Hush's plot by a sadist threat against his own daughter. On the ground kneeled the Commissioner with Thomas Elliot in his bandages and trenchcoat standing over him with one of his Colt .45s.

"Hello, Bruce."

Batman's eyes narrowed. "You don't get to talk to me anymore, Tommy. You don't have that right." Beneath the stoic exterior, Batman always had a heart throbbing with pain. Many horrors would follow him to his grave. But the horror of befriending a sociopath ended here. He fell for his mask of sanity; he saw a human being where none existed. Anyone could have made that mistake, especially a little boy desperate for a friend.

"Happiness depends upon ourselves, Bruce. My plan for happiness required money. More money than a child had access to. If it helps you sleep at night, I didn't want to do it. They just got in the way of what I wanted. Do you know what I want now?" Batman nodded. "Yes. And sooner or later, I always get what I want." Batman readied himself. "Wait, don't you want me to disarm the explosive in Barbara's spine first."

Batman grinned. "You never placed an explosive in Barbara's spine. I would have figured that out already if you had told me." Batman drew closer to Thomas. "You blackmailed Jim but not me. Clayface didn't know the truth but I do." Batman tapped his head where he had Hush's last homing beacon removed by heat vision. "You know better than to try the same trick twice."

Hush paused for a moment. "I need to show you something." He unraveled his bandages to reveal his bald head. "I wore a wig the day you saw me. I inherited more than my mother's fortune. I have less than a year. It doesn't matter though. We all die, some sooner than others. But if I have to go, I'd rather take you with me."

Batman reached for his grapnel gun. "Come now, Bruce. Do you think your gun can outdraw mine? That little toy of yours can't stand up to a decent handgun, especially one with these bullets in it." Hush smirked. "This freak show has gone on long enough. High time someone finished what Joe Chill started."

Batman fired at Thomas Elliot. The blunt edge of the Batarang glanced off of Thomas' forehead, staggering him. Tommy brought up his gun and got off a shot. A center-of-mass penetration, the same shot that killed his parents. Not instantly fatal, the shot would bleed him out in seconds.

As his body surrendered to shock, he watched the Commissioner reach for a derringer around his left ankle. He placed it against Tommy's right temple and fired. Batman had chosen to spare Tommy's life. It cost him his. Death, what he had witnessed many times during his life, he would now experience. These thoughts, his last thoughts, as the Dark Knight descended into shadows. 


	16. Chapter 16

Disclaimer: I do not own "Batman" or its characters.

Hush's Last Stand

Lazarus Pit

Lazarus Pits. Named after Lazarus, brother of Mary, raised from the dead by Jesus of Nazareth. The geomancy equivalent to hot springs; these chemical baths possessed the ability to restore the dying and the dead. As Batman, Bruce Wayne had succeeded in destroying nearly all of them. Ra's al Ghul knew the location of the two remaining Lazarus Pits. Rumors circulated of a third somewhere in the Himalayas.

Alfred Pennyworth could only hope that Ra's al Ghul and the League of Shadows had not intercepted it. Before his current career, Alfred had done a little mountain climbing. Even professional mountaineers had trouble scaling the Himalayas at this time of year. And almost none of them did it while towing a corpse, at least not uphill.

Speaking of corpses, Thomas Elliot had just died after several months in a coma at Gotham General. The brain surgeon had died from a head wound only he could have operated on. He never got the opportunity to die from the cancer eating away at his body. Poetic justice, even if Bruce Wayne would not have seen it that way.

Alfred had forged a will stating his desire to have his body cremated and his ashes spread in the Gotham River. Whether he lived again or not, Master Bruce would not have the displeasure of ever facing Hush again. At least not in this life. Thomas Elliot's reign of terror had ended.

The Joker had not resurfaced yet. He took a rather nasty fall in the abandoned mining tunnels under Sprang Mission. Conceivably, it could have killed him. Alfred didn't buy it though. The Joker always returned from seemingly fatal circumstances. He survived an explosion that wiped the Gotham World's Fairgrounds off the map.

The Gotham City Police Department had dropped the charges against Bruce Wayne. Commissioner Gordon, Hush's killer, confessed to a conspiracy to destroy Bruce's reputation. To keep up appearances, Dick Grayson adopted the role of Bruce Wayne on a full-time basis. As far as anyone knew, Bruce Wayne had not died.

Declared dead that very night, Batman received the largest funeral service in Gotham history. Out of respect, they chose to bury him in his costume. Half of Gotham and all the Justice League attended. When the crowds had vanished to mourn his passing in solitude, Alfred set to work on the unsavory task of grave robbing.

Even after he died, his crusade needed him. Without him around, the crimes in Gotham had gotten even more heinous and sadistic. All of his rogues' gallery behaved in this fashion as if they knew that Batman would never return. Superman tried his hand at the task. It worked until the kryptonite black market reached Gotham.

Bruce Wayne once raised would try to attack him. The flood of adrenaline and mind-altering hormones made such an attack inevitable. Alfred also readied a handheld grenade. If the League of Shadows arrived, he would need it. Of course, all of this presumed he would find this place with its healing properties intact and that it would work on a corpse as old as this.

Then, Alfred saw it. That junction of ley lines filled with a chemical bath. Alfred unzipped the body bag as he dangled it into the mysterious waters. The liquids penetrated the body with a sort of glowing energy. Postmortem decay vanished along with the bullet wound to his chest. In that moment, Bruce Wayne opened his eyes.

A highly trained hand-to-hand combat temporarily endowed with increased strength and insanity, Alfred took no chances. Alfred pressed a button, causing the Batsuit's inverted electrical defense grid to incapacitate him. In time, the madness of resurrection would pass and he would regain his senses.

With the familiar glimmer of sanity back in his eyes, Bruce Wayne looked up at him. "What happened, Alfred?" Of course, noting the location and his current condition with the legendary speed and accuracy of the world's greatest detective, he quickly realized what had happened. "Alfred, you shouldn't have done this."

Indeed. Not only did he expose him to various unknown chemical agents, his use of a Lazarus Pit would certainly draw of the ire of the League of Shadows. Alfred handed Bruce a set of mountain-climbing attire. They had a long and dangerous walk ahead of them. Best not to focus on the negative.

Alfred pulled the pin and launched the grenade into the cave opening. The explosion collapsed the entrance. Ra's al Ghul would have no evidence of what they had done, at least not for a while. Master Tim had already fought the Scarecrow since Master Bruce's death. He remembered Batman's secret identity quite clearly.

Bruce Wayne clearly tried not to talk or even think about what happened. Bruce Wayne knew that his moment of truth had arrived. Death had visited him and the disorientation of its reversal plagued his mind. After all the death and the violence and the horror, life went on and so would the Caped Crusader. 


End file.
